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Stand Out: VR Battle Royale is one of the most ambitious VR games on the market right now. It’s in Steam Early Access and it pits about 30 players against one another on a single, large map in a fight to the death. It’s battle royale game of course, like Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) but it’s entirely in VR. You have to physically reload your guns, you can climb around on the environment, and even duck to take cover. Raptor Lab is a small indie studio so it’s extremely unpolished and rough around the edges, but it’s got a dedicated community and is tons of fun if you can look past the shortcomings. Well, now they’re pushing things even further with War Dust.

War Dust features twice as many players as Stand Out, with 64, and will include tons of vehicles, large objective-based maps, and more to try and make your Battlefield VR dreams a reality. It’s just now in Alpha (not even Early Access or Beta yet) so it’s even rougher than Stand Out, but it sure does sound impressive.

You can see in the trailer above that War Dust is much more than just another VR FPS. You can fly jets and helicopters, drive tanks and ATVs, and so much more. In a press release the company sent me, they say that their vision for War Dust is to “create a feeling of being a part of a real epic war” rather than just small-scale skirmishes like other VR titles.

Obviously, the concern is player count. Firewall Zero Hour is a PSVR-exclusive 4v4 multiplayer-only shooter on PSVR and even that game sometimes has down times and Sony was concerned about player counts — and there are three million PSVR headsets out there. I highly doubt there are that many Rifts, Vives, and Windows VR headsets combined but that isn’t stopping Raptor Lab.

In War Dust you and 31 other players join together for a massive 32v32 battle with all 64 of you on the same map at the same time fighting it out. Then having to worry about aerial enemies, dogfights, tanks, and more honestly seems too ambitious to be real.

It’s worth mentioning that Raptor Lab doesn’t have the greatest track record with actually finishing games. Their Steam catalog is already four games deep and now War Dust is on the horizon. Both Stand Out, their battle royale offering, and Deus Vult, a fantasy-themed melee action game, are still in Early Access and have been for a while.

Now with lots of VR FPS games on the horizon, like Zero Caliber, Warzone, Population One, Virtual Battlegrounds, and plenty of existing titles as competition, War Dust won’t have an easy time getting 64-players online at all times.

You can find more information about War Dust on the official Steam page and if you’re interested in joining the Alpha test period, which starts today on October 12th, 2018, then you can do so at the company’s official Discord server here.

I’m usually not a big fan of procedural generation in games. While I’ve obviously spent my fair amount of time exploring planets in No Man’s Sky and clearing out ships From Other Suns with friends, typically I’d prefer a hand-crafted experience that is higher quality that I can play once and remember fondly, than replaying a game over and over with a hodge-podge of similar levels. But then a game like In Death comes along.

In Death is really something special. If this game were not in VR it’d be an entirely unremarkable and boring bow and arrow shooter with light procedural elements, but since it takes place inside of VR, it’s dramatically enhanced. The premise is simple: the kingdom of Heaven is overrun and in ruins and it’s up to you, an angelic bow and arrow being, to swoop in and clear out the tainted medieval castles to restore balance.

In Death takes heavy inspiration from classic roguelike games in that every time you play you start from the beginning and work your way through the layers of the world. There are no save points and each time you die, the layout, enemy spawn points, types of enemies, and more are all shuffled around. Similar to The Persistence, it really does feel like a different experience each time.

Obviously the walls, floor, objects in the environment, and textures all mostly look about the same, but the paths you take and even the enemies you fight will change. Instead of totally randomizing things, there is a progressive element to what you unlock.

Thankfully, the core gameplay is so solid that it’s just a blast to play on a moment-to-moment basis. While exploring the castle you have your basic arrow for shooting, but then you can also shoot a teleport arrow or toss a teleport shard to move around the environment. There are artificial movement options as well in the settings if you want to turn those on. But frankly, the teleportation was such an integral part of the gameplay and fit the setting, it’s all I really used.

Once you get your bearings and get the hang of the arrow trajectory and physics, it’s the best VR bow and arrow I’ve seen to date. I was able to get headshots from way across levels and fire off a rapid volley of arrows that archers in Skyrim or QuiVR would be jealous of. There’s a cross bow too, but everyone knows a bow and arrow are way cooler.

In addition to your bow you’ll find a bunch of special arrows either scattered around the world or for purchase at one of the currency checkpoints that enable things like scatter arrows, fire arrows, and more. You can also summon a shield on your non-dominant hand to block projectile attacks like other arrows. If enemies close in on you for melee attacks (and they will, often) you can also bash them with your shield to make room or use the teleport shard to quickly move out of the way.

Magic Leap introduced a concept called Mica and called it “her” during a section of its 3-hour keynote this week about how an artificial intelligence could operate as an assistant to humans.

I feel like I met in person what Magic Leap showed in its video.

After the keynote, I sought out Mica and found her sitting downstairs. I was able to see her because Magic Leap equipped me with a Magic Leap One and told me to enter the room. When I saw her it was clear “she” wanted me to sit down with a wave of her arm, and I did.

I sat across from Mica at this table.

I’ve described this entity I saw with short hair exuding micro-expressions and arm motions as both “it” and “she” which, if you’ve ever seen Ex Machina, is the core idea explored in that film. Mica was lit nothing like in the video, so her skin and hair didn’t look anywhere near as detailed or “real” as it does in the video. Still, it seemed as if the fidelity of her facial expressions were all there. That’s the part that seemed to mess with my brain. I felt like those micro-expressions were inviting me to care about the entity, and they were succeeding. Mica motioned for me to pick up a picture frame from the table and I didn’t catch the hint because I was too focused on trying to dismantle and understand the effect her expressions were having on me.

“Above all else, her facial movements are what connect you to her,” said John Monos, Magic Leap’s vice president in charge of “human-centered” artificial intelligence. “The lesson here: Mica is an ideal interface to the human-centered AI that evokes natural reactions from us.”

Why did I conceive of this agent as a female and were my reactions to its expressions and movements different than if it had been introduced or rendered in an androgynous or more masculine way? What if it hadn’t been introduced in the keynote as “her” and I hadn’t read a tweet suggesting it looked like Angelina Jolie from Hackers first?

One Twitter report suggests it is possible to interact with this entity and conceive of it as a genderless “system”. But that’s not how I saw it and I found myself wondering why it was rendered in such a way, and if my reaction to it was influenced by my perception of its gender. For me, Mica was basically a mirror or Rorschach test and it was freaking me out.

At one point a human from the real world told me what the next step was — picking up the frame from the table — and I sprang into action then. Mica then approached the frame and put her finger to the blank canvas — magically revealing Rene Magritte’s “This Is Not A Pipe” there in the center of my vision.

She then plucked the “pipe” from the frame and held it in her hand, giggling before excusing herself and disappearing behind a bookcase. Would

Facebook uses iPhone’s AI depth-sensor to a new layer of realism to your photos. Originally announced during the 2018 F8 developer conference back in May, Facebook’s 3D Photos feature is now officially available on your News Feed and in VR. By utilizing the 3D depth maps stored with portrait photos taken recent dual-lens iPhone models,

Earlier this week on his livestream talk show, God of War and Twisted Metal creator, David Jaffe, received a phone call from Cory Barlog, the Director and Writer for the most recent PS4 God of War game that released this year. During the chat (warning: language is extremely NSFW), they discussed the series, this year’s game’s overwhelmingly positive reception, and the future for each of them.

Near the end of the part-interview part-casual conversation, they start talking about VR, mostly focused on PSVR at first. Specifically, Jaffe (a huge fan of VR) wants to know if Barlog is going to work on a VR game.

“I don’t know, who knows what the future holds on that one,” Barlog says. “I still have not gotten to a point where I don’t get nauseated after about 25 minutes in VR…I played that Farpoint game, which is so phenomenally cool with the gun controller, but man moving around, oof, that made me nauseous. Then there’s the new one that Orth worked on, Fireteam (sic, Firewall Zero Hour), and that one looks amazing! I really want to play, but I’d be the guy that says ‘Guys, I gotta stop, I’m getting sick.'”

After hearing that reaction, Jaffe shifts gears to talk about room-scale VR, since that’s a great avenue to help cut back on motion sickness.

“Once you do it you never want to go back, it’s f***ing amazing,” Jaffe says. “VR has its hooks in me so deep and so wonderfully, that if I could create the opportunity for myself to get back into games with VR, I would be all over it, that’s how transformative it can be if you have a good VR experience. The dream was always let’s make games in the holodeck, but we’re not gonna live long enough for that. Room-based VR at least makes you feel like it’s the future of interactive entertainment.”

After creating and working on a litany of Twisted Metal games, as well as designing and directing the first two God of War games, Jaffe moved on to his own studio, The Bartlet Jones Supernatural Detective Agency, which released Drawn to Death last year, a free-to-play third-person arena battle/shooting game with a bold, hand-drawn aesthetic.

After discussing VR a bit more, Barlog asks Jaffe what type of VR game he’d want to work on and, surprisingly, Jaffe already has a very specific vision.

“I would want to do a horror game,” Jaffe says. “I have a game about, sort of like when the levees broke in Katrina. I’d like to do a horror game based around, they had all the coffins floating down the street…I love the idea of doing a horror game that’s like scuba diving and you’re on a boat and it’s constantly raining, kind of like a supernatural version of Jaws set in this sort of flooded New Orleans town. I’d like to do some kind of horror game based on that.”

Near the end of their conversation Jaffe sheds some light on why he’s so